Cultural Depictions of Lady Jane Grey - 19th Century To Present

19th Century To Present

It was not until the early nineteenth century that John Lingard, a Catholic historian, ventured a word or two of counter-adulation about Jane, saying that she 'liked dresses overmuch', and reminding her promoters that she was only sixteen. However, her popularity as a subject for tragic romance increased even further in the nineteenth century, an age of mass printing, where her story appears in a variety of media, including popular magazines and children's books. The 19th century also saw several operatic treatments of her story, including Nicola Vaccai's 1836 opera Giovanna Gray.

Jane was recast time and again to suit the inclinations of her audience. After the French Revolution, the evangelical movement alighted on her as a symbol, marked not for her romance but for her piety. In 1828 The Lady's Monitor declared that she inherited "every great, every good, every admirable quality, whether of mind, disposition, or person." The radical thinker and philosopher William Godwin called her "the most perfect young creature of the female sex to be found in history" in his own hagiography of Jane published under the pseudonym Theopilius Marcliffe. Mark Twain used Jane as a minor character in his 1882 novel, The Prince and the Pauper.